Spoken Like Poetry


Spoken by Lucious:

The second time they flooded this holler,
It had rained for about two weeks,
Seemed like every day.

They had about five or six dams built up there
And they had coal piled up in it.
And they was going to clean that pond, that pit of coal up,
And what they had was loose dirt piled up to hold that water in there.
When they sunk that backhoe bucket in that loose dirt all that water pressure,
It all come down through here.

You talk about something awful.

Car tires.

Trees.

Logs.

Car hoods.

Everything.

‘Cause it used to be a garbage dump up there.
Everything come down
And you talk about something stinking.

Good God almighty.



This material originally appeared in Plundering Appalachia: The Tragedy of Mountaintop-Removal Coal Mining. The book was edited by Tom Butler and George Wuerther and it was published by Earth Aware Editions in 2009. The material was printed as a transcript of a spoken interview. I copied the transcript verbatim then I edited it by simply changing the sentences in paragraphs to lines in a “poem”.

Emerald